In some conventional signal processing systems, a radio frequency (RF) signal may be converted to an intermediate frequency (IF), and then from IF to a baseband signal, where the IF may be in the megahertz range. Generally, the RF signal may be mixed with a local oscillator (LO) signal that may result in two sideband signals. The two sideband signals may comprise the sum of the frequencies of the two signals and the difference of the frequencies of the two signals. One of the two sideband signals may be selected as an IF signal, where the IF signal may be the same for all received RF signals. A radio that may receive a plurality of channels, such as an AM or FM radio, may tune to a particular station by changing the local oscillator signal frequency such that the IF remains constant. With a constant IF, most of the receive path may be common in the receiver.
With recent advances in technology, much of radio receiver development may be driven mostly by a great demand for mobile wireless communication devices, including handsets. With the ever-decreasing size of mobile handsets, capacities of smaller batteries may be an issue. As most of these handsets may use complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology for analog to digital conversion, and for much of the processing of voice and data signals, a very important factor to consider may be that it may be advantageous for CMOS devices to work at lower frequencies. This may be crucial since CMOS devices have power dissipation directly related to the speed at which the CMOS devices switch. The faster the frequencies, the faster the CMOS device switching speed, and therefore, the greater the amount of power consumed. The receivers may be designed to downconvert the high frequency RF, which may be in gigahertz range, to a lower frequency, preferably to a baseband frequency, as quickly as possible.
As a result, some receivers may utilize chips for digitally processing baseband signals, and may expect to receive the baseband signal, rather than an IF signal. To meet this need, some receiver architectures, for example, direct-conversion receivers, may be adapted not to utilize IF by converting directly from RF to baseband, and therefore reduce implementation costs as well as power consumption by not processing IF signals. However, with direct conversion, the reduced power consumption may be offset by strong drawbacks, such as DC-offset generation, interference noise, I/Q mismatch, excessive flicker noise in the baseband, and local oscillator (LO) leakage. In addition, a digital signal processor (DSP) may be required to perform complex digital processing of the digital signal for filtering and downconverting from the RF frequency.
If a measured signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is less than a desired SNR, the DSP may need to perform, for example, distortion cancellation or other SNR reduction or mitigation function. Additionally, during direct conversion a majority of gain and filtering may be performed in a frequency band from DC to the signal bandwidth. In this process, a signal path's intrinsic DC offsets may be amplified. The dynamic range of the circuit may thereby be degraded. In addition, a DC offset may be created if the LO signal leaks to the RF front end and self-mixes. Some systems, for example, GSM systems, may utilize modulation and system synchronization techniques that require DC information. As a result, it may not be feasible to simply remove the DC component and complex and costly DSP processing may be required to reduce the DC offset while still keeping the information present in the DC signal. Further, conventional direct conversion receivers, as well as conventional receivers that utilize conversion to IF, may utilize one or more downconversion mixers to mix one or more input signals with an oscillator signal of a determined frequency. Both the input signal and the oscillator signals, however, may also introduce a plurality of harmonics into the mixing circuitry thus increasing the overall noise profile in a generated output signal.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.